Joe Scarborough Goes Off on ‘Right Wing Noise Machine,’ Argues Leaker Was a ‘Really Pissed Off’ Conservative

Joe Scarborough believes it’s far more likely that the individual who leaked the draft Roe v. Wade decision was a conservative trying to lock in Justices on the fence than a liberal trying to sway the final decision.

Scarborough’s well-thought-out essay, which was presented with the rare Morning Joe one-shot, started with a clip of Senator Ted Cruz insisting that he’s not a moron and that the idea that a conservative leaked the memo was “ludicrous.”

In the 24 hours that followed the bombshell leak, many leading conservative voices blasted the person behind the leak, many making a clear insinuation that it was a liberal clerk trying to disrupt history. But Scarborough sees it differently.

“I do agree with Ted, Senator Cruz, that it was leaked by someone unhappy in the direction the court was going, but the question is which person was moving and direction they were moving?” Scarborough said. “The right-wing noise machine always turns into overdrive,” he added, ridiculing the raft of conservative voices immediately blaming someone on the left for the leak without anything more than circumstantial evidence.

But the circumstances of a motivated leak cut both ways, as Scarborough proceeded to detail.

The Morning Joe host then echoed an argument made by the New York Times’ columnist Adam Liptak. He published an essay about motives and suggested that a conservative Justice, or a clerk working for one, would be just as motivated to reveal justices in favor of overturning the landmark abortion rights decision as a means to lock them in, in the event a Justice was wavering.

After a brief detour mocking the so-called “restraint” of Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginny (which included a mea culptastic “what was I thinking?!” moment of Scarborough for working with many of these same Republicans) he returned to the thesis of his essay.

“The plotting argument that Alito’s majority had no reason to leak the court’s decision assumes it was still the majority,” Scarborough said, adding incredulously,  “Three months after it was written in February!”

“It’s more likely that somebody on the hard right was really pissed off that a Justice moved away from Alito’s really harsh right-wing diatribe on abortion. And instead, moved more towards Roberts’ way,” Scarborough explained. “It’s a classic, ‘hey, we’ve got the receipts, buddy. We’ve got — don’t even think about moving away from Alito and taking a more nuanced path. Because we have the receipts.'”

“You know, maybe that may be why the chief justice’s statement started with a declaration that the leaked document, quote, does not represent a decision by the court or the final position of any member on the issues in this case,” the Morning Joe host continued.

“You know to me, I could be wrong, maybe Ted [Cruz} is right, maybe I’m wrong,” Scarborough concluded. “But if you are just looking at this in the most Machiavellian way possible, it makes far more sense it was a fanatical law clerk on the right who leaked a document to stop one of the conservative members of the court from going away from Alito’s position and a more nuanced path towards a destination.”

Watch above via MSNBC.